2008 Election

by

Sexism, feminism and the election

Ever since Hilliary Clinton became a serious candidate for President and the media, bloggers, and the Obama campaign discussed her, the debate about which remarks were sexist raged on.  Now with Sarah Palin’s nomination for Republican VP, it continues.

I’m old enough to remember the early days of the women’s movement.  I remember the moment at an obscure and long forgotten SDS meeting in D.C. (maybe at GW(?) when women were expected to leave the meeting to make sandwiches.  Some of us refused.  The men were shocked. It was out of those days that the women’s movement was born.  I have worked for the equal rights amendment, was a delegate to the International Women’s Conference in Houston, TX in 1977, served on and worked for Commissions for Women and am a proud “founding Mother” of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women.  Even with that experience, i still have difficulty figuring out what is sexist and what is just political.

While I was driving around doing errands today, I caught most of a story on NPR about the protests at the Miss American pagent in 1968. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94240375 and was struck by the interview with the Miss American who was turning over her crown that year.

Looking back on the events of 1968, however, Snodgrass says she now has a better understanding of what the women’s liberation movement was actually about.

“I see that I have reaped some of the benefits of what they were trying to say,” Snodgrass says. “I think it was a poor choice to try to say it in that way. But I can get a charge card myself. I don’t have to have a husband sign for that.”

So does Sarah Palin  also understand that she is where she is because of women like me who were in the trenches?  Women who worked hard to make sure that she and her daughter have the choice to have a child or not?  And here I’m not just talking about abortion but also about bith control.  Does she understand that she is Governor of Alaska because of a long line of feminists going back before the Civil War?

So what is sexist and what is fair game? I have no doubt that how Sarah Palin chooses to raise her family and be governor (or heaven forbid, Vice President), at the same time will be hers and her husband, Todd’s.  Bringing that into electoral politics is sexist.  But looking into how she handled earmarks, lobbied for federal funds, whether she fired the head libraian when she was Mayor, and whether she abused her power as Governor as all fair game and would be so even if she were mail. 

Palin speaks about Hillary’s “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” as if all those women should vote for her because she is a women and many of them are also women.  What she fails to understand is that many of those women, particularly of my generation, fought to allow women choices.  Palin would take away choice.  Choice whether or not it is right to have a child, choice as to what we want to read, choice as to  how we each want to live our lives.  This is not feminism.

by

Thoughts on the election and values

What are values anyway?  Aren’t they beliefs that we hold as principles which guide our lives?  Like equal justice and fair play?  Like freedom to make individual choices under law?  Like the right to privacy?

I think Barak Obama is right when he says that we should look at the politics of the McCain /Palin ticket not their personal lives.  And yet I have these nagging thoughts that keep circling around my head.  Sarah Palin does not seem to believe either in abortion or birth control which is her right, but everyone can’t afford to support a 17 year old daughter and her 18 year old husband to be.  And she also doesn’t believe in housing for pregnant teens since she vetoed state funding for the Covenant Transitional House in Alaska.  So, Sarah, what exactly is a poor young woman whose family either cannot or will not support her supposed to do?  Is being a teen mother for the privileged?  And all the Republicans who seem to excuse Bristol (who obviously did not follow the rule of abstinence) by saying, “well these things happen” only excusing young women who are white and middle class?  Sarah Palin would also condemn the young woman who made the difficult choice to have an abortion.

I can’t help wondering what would happen if if the situation were reversed – if the Obamas’ had a teenaged daughter who was pregnant by some kid who was only interested in basketball or hanging out on a street corner in Chicago.  Wouldn’t the Republicans be all over him, condemming this example of black irresponsibility and lack of morals? It seems to me that the so-called family values of the Republicans and Christian right are flexible when it comes to one of theirs, but not so flexible when it comes to people outside the group.

Ellen Goodman has some interesting thoughts about all this in her column in the Boston Globe today.

I shifted into high dudgeon over the Sexism in the Media, Part II, the blogcreeps and cablescum sneering at her beauty queen bio and her working-mom credentials. Then came the news that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. Immediately, the “family values” folks who have fashioned a political wedge out of moral judgments began insisting that anyone who remarked on this baby bump was an insensitive invader of privacy.

What did James Dobson of Focus on the Family say? This teen pregnancy showed that “she and her family are human.” Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council praised Bristol for “choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation.”

Meanwhile Obama himself, the son of an 18-year-old mother, said strongly that “People’s families are off-limits and people’s children are especially off-limits.” Well, OK. But let’s not forget that it’s the right wing that made social issues into a political issue. The right wing decided that pregnancy was not a matter of private decision-making but a harsh and unrelenting political battle

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/03/you_want_change_how_about_drama/

The bottom line:  I think what Sarah and Todd Palin do with their daughter – which to me looks like exploiting her – is up to them.  But they need to learn to respect those who might make a different choice and to support those families and young women (and men) also.  The two people I feel the most sorry for in this entire business are Bristol Palin and Levi Johnson.

by

Sarah Palin and the Republican Convention

 

John McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as running mate shows how desperate he is to distract attention from the fact that he is a cranky old man with nothing to offer but more of the same. Palin is a blatant pander for the women’s vote. He must think we have the collective IQ of a Tampax.

So begin Katha Pollit’s comments on Sarah Palin and the Vice Presidency.  http://www.thenation.com/blogs/anotherthing/351330

And today’s revelations include a pregnant 17 year old unmarried daughter (was this technically statutory rape?) and a the fact that she has finally decided to hire a private attorney to represent her in the troopergate investigations, something she probably should have done a while ago.  Is this a Thomas Eagleton vice-presidential pick in the making?

It never ceases to amaze me that the family values republicans are the ones who are who have sex with minors, have affairs both heterosexual and homosexual, and possibly even killed an intern to cover-up an affair.  On the other hand, the democrats will always have Bill Clinton.

Now although, thank goodness, Gustav was not a bad as he could have been, we are facing two more hurricanes in a week.  Hanna and Irving are approaching.  Will John McCain give his acceptance speech even if a hurricane is hitting Florida?  If John McCain not having to speak a plus or minus?  I don’t know.

by

The Republican Veep

What’s up with Sarah Palin?  The Democrats did not pick Tim Kaine in part because his electoral experience was Richmond City Council, Mayor of Richmond and not quite 3 years as governor of Virginia.  Sound a lot like Palin’s resume.  This is the woman that John McCain picked – at age 72 – to sit a hearbeat away fromt the Presidency?  At least Tim speaks Spanish and has lived in Latin America.

This reminds me a lot of the Dan Quayle pick.  Of course, maybe I don’t want to think about that too much as that worked – or at least didn’t hurt the Republicans.  And reports are that she’s on tape saying she really didn’t want to be vice president because she didn’t know what a vice president did (!).  She also under investigation for corrpution in Alaska.

I think this is a cynical move to curry favor with the religious right and maybe some Clinton supporters.  I hope the Bill and Hillary have made it clear enough that John McCain and now Sara Palin stand in opposition for everything Hillary was fighting for during the primaries.

by

The Last Night of the Convention

I was just too tired last night to write anything and having overslept a little this morning had to haul myself to work.  But Barak Obama’s speech was all anyone could ask for.  Tough, full of specifics and Presidential.  The policy parts reminded me of a state of the union address.  And he went right back at John McCain.

I had been one of the skeptics about using a stadium.  Was it over the top?  Would it be partially empty?  No on both counts.  I disagree with some critics that the ordinary people who came out and spoke about their problems and why they are supporting Obama were too much like a telethon.  The best line was “I’m Barney Smith, not Smith Barney.”  The only grip I had was the lack of close-ups of the Obama family and then of the united Obama-Biden family at the end.  They seems really far awy on TV.

It is time to get to work to get Obama elected.

by

Can we win?

Day 3 is over.  Can I be hopeful now?  The parade of veterans: the first African American Sergeant Major, a retired Admiral, a retired general and Tammy Duckworth.  Joe Biden – and the clear endorsement of a former President who has been there.   In my mind, Bill Clinton has redeemed himself and reminded me why I campaigned and voted for him.

It is really hard to take in the fact that we have nominated a mixed heritage, African American to be President.  I was 16 and sitting with my feet in the reflecting pool when I heard Martin Luther King (to be honest I was move impressed that day by John Lewis) talk about his dream.  And now it is coming true.

Life is good – and the Red Sox beat the Yankees.

by

Hillary’s Three Point Shot

The game is tied.  The clock is ticking down.  Hillary Clinton has the ball.  She shoots.  Yes!  Three points!

All the talk and speculation can end now. “No way. No how. No McCain.”  She also asked her supporters if they were in it for just for her or for who she stands for.  After her speech any of her supporter who does not support Obama is either not a Democrat or has a mental illness.  Hilliary gave the speech of her life on Women’s Equality Day.  She was not known for making the “big speech”, but there was nothing awkward or forced last night.  She was forceful and clear about who she supported and why.  You go, Girl!  Bill and Joe have a lot to live up to tonight.

And on to other convention news:  Mitt Romney was evidently on the floor duing Deval Patricks’s speech.  No one can tell me that it was accidental.  The absentee governor trying, unsuccessfully, to take the spotlight from the first Massachusetts governor in a dozen years who is actually governing.  Romney is the governor who went out of state and made fun of the state of which he was the elected governor.  Will he actually be McCain’s pick?  Can’t wait for more “dog on the roof of the car” jokes and more tape of his illegal immigrants working in his yard.

by

Media Coverage

I noticed an interesting statistic in Frank Rich’s column on Sunday http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/opinion/24rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin which I just got around to reading last night.

But as Geroge Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs documented in its study of six weeks of TV new reports this summer, Obamas’s coverage was 28 percent positive and 72 percent negative. (For McCain, the split was 43/57.))

I think this is in part because the TV continually reports on McCain’s advertisments which are increasingly negative. (Hey, John. What happened to your positive campaign?)  The pundits also fail to point out McCain’s falsehoods and flip-flops.  As I have written before when is the mainstream media going to report on Cindy McCain’s money and lies about her family?  (someone other than the New York Times, that is. ) I guess the humanitarian trip to Georgia is supposed to soften her image somehow.

Eric Alterman has some good things to say on this subject in The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/348595

I keep hoping the media coverage of the Obama/Biden ticket will take a positive turn which will, I trust, lift the polls.

by

Michelle Obama

I’m with Keith Oberman on this one.  Wow!   So, Cindy McCain, what do you say now?  (I know Mrs. McCain is on a humanitarian trip to Georgia.  I’d love to know if she has ever done anything like this before.)

The biographies of both Michelle and Barak are so compelling and seeing her on stage with the two girls talking to their father who was appearing by remote television was just wonderful.  The girls are cute and bright and obviously in love with their parents.  I loved Shasha taking the mike and saying, “What city are you in, Daddy?”

I just don’t understand why people, ordinary Americans, might not elect this man and this familiy to the White House.  How could anyone have looked at the stage last might and wondered if they were American enough, ordinary enough to relate?

by

We have a Ticket

The wait is finally over and Joe Biden is the man.  While I’m disappointed that the pick wasn’t either Bill Richardson or my old friend, Tim Kaine, I understand exactly why Obama picked Biden.  Yesterday all the buzz both at the office and socializing after was about the pick.  I said that I was sure that it was going to be Biden.  I thought Evan Bayh was too conservative and Tim Kaine too inexperienced and that Hillary had too much baggage.  Too bad I didn’t place any bets. 

Watching the Springfield rally today, I realized Biden could play the role that Obama can’t play and still appear “Presidential”.  Biden can go on the attack and link McCain to W and and the wrong direction of the country.  I’m not sure any of the other potentials could do this with the same experience base, the same familiarity with McCain. I think he shores up the Democratic base but I’m still not sure that he can bring along white voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for a black man. 

I know there are a lot of questions about whether Biden can “stay on message” with his history of rambling and putting his foot in his mouth.  I heard one comment (sorry can’t remember who but it on one thousand panelists on MSMBC – maybe John Harwood) that remarks like the Biden’s about not being able to go into a convenience store without hearing an Indian accent might solicit a nod of agreement among those who don’t worry about being politically correct, that they might look at it as just a statement of fact.

But in my neighborhood things are hopping.  I was doing voter registration at the local supermarket this morning.  We were careful to remain neutral, but folks registering and people just passing by expressed many times that they had registered or were registering because of the importance of the election.  We even recruited one of the store workers to help up round up the unregistered.  He said that everyone had to vote because this was a “very important election”.  Lots of people said that they were for Obama and were taking registration cards home to friends and family.  We even had one fellow changing his address because is had been a Biden supporter during the primary and now wanted to be sure he could vote for him.

I think with Barak Obama, the inspirational leader, and Joe Biden, the experienced plain talker, we may have a winning team.